Are you going about link building the wrong way?

Link building is a big part of SEO. Unfortunately, many new site owners seem to either not fully understand what goes into link building or they have old, outdated information. In either case, not knowing what you are doing can have its drawbacks. It can cause you not to rank well and in extreme cases, it can get you banned.

Many large companies hire people to create a “link campaign”. The problem is that many companies don’t know what they need and the link builder in some cases only has one method of building links.


The most common link building method is link exchanges. Though search engines like Google frown on them, they can be an effective strategy for raising page rank. For some businesses, however, there simply aren’t a whole lot of people to exchange links with. The biggest problem I see on a regular basis is when people just link to whoever. The link may or may not be related and they always seem to link to a “link page” with reciprocals to either their homepage or back to their own link page. This is not the way to go.


You have other pages of your site. Targeting each page’s keywords with those back links will help you in the rankings. If you must exchange links, spread them throughout your site. Have the incoming links support other pages, not just your homepage. Also don’t exchange links with unrelated sites. These can cause your site to be incompletely crawled and in severe cases, get can you banned.


Exchanging links with other low PR and heavily reciprocal linking sites will not do you good in ranking well on the engines. The only exception occurs when you can link to a new site that is related and that you feel will eventually have a high PR. In other words, sometimes getting in on the ground floor is a good idea.


Buying links is great, if you know where and how to buy them. Use the same rules as exchanging links above. Always make sure the site is related to what you offer. Don’t be afraid to buy a link on a site if you feel it will drive in quality traffic.


Article submissions are popular, and for good reason. Just write an article and submit it to article syndication sites. It’s highly effective and can be very useful if done correctly. I see many companies fail to take advantage of the anchor text in the articles and when they do it almost always goes straight to the homepage. I also notice a lot of poorly written articles. If you want your article to be placed on other sites or are planning to build your brand, a poorly written article will not help you.


There are many other ways of getting links, but these are the most common. Hopefully, this will leave you with the correct impression that linking is not all about quantity. It is about the quality of the links, the content around them, the pages they are on and the pages they link to.